Angels & Airwaves Month: We Don’t Need to Whisper
I think the best way to put my feelings about this album is that it is solid. Its ambitions exceed its execution but the end result is not bad at all. In fact, many times it's pretty good. In one or two areas, it's kind of great. In others, it's average-to-poor, but we will get to those later.
What I do like about this album is that it knows how to breathe. Too often, songs feel compressed and rushed, and would actually benefit from a longer run-time. Not so here. True, this same characteristic has been a source of criticism in the past, but I actually think it's pretty cool. Many songs on the album take their time to build and grow in a natural and organic way, and it's not like the long instrumental sections aren't interesting in their own right. The floating bassline in opener, "Valkyrie Missile" is gorgeous and it grows into a fantastic rush of skittering drums and warbling guitars, feeling much like the rocket it's named after. The chugging march of the incredibly under-appreciated "The War" is so buoyant and catchy that, when I first heard it as a snot-nosed fourteen-year-old and didn't know any better, I ignored the rest of the song and looped the intro over and over again. I hardly think I should have to defend the beginning of "The Adventure", which contains a riff so potent and memorable that it's practically the only song anyone who isn't a mega-fan talks about in AvA's discography. A long intro isn't bad. A long, boring, and pointless intro is bad, and I'd argue that most of these intros are neither of those things.
An oft-criticised element of this band is the U2-worship style of their guitar-work. De Longe clearly has a thing for the delay-pedal, and uses it in much the same way as The Edge does: to create a sprawling, stadium-ready atmosphere which echoes off the walls and expands into space. Is he as good at doing that as The Edge? No, of course not. But he also doesn't really ever fully commit to emulating The Edge's style, instead opting for a mixture of the delay-pedals that U2 is known for and the pop-punk drive that Blink-182 was known for. Combine this with the thunderous drumming of Atom Willard (of The Offspring fame) and Ryan Sinn's fantastic, resonant bass guitar, and you have a recipe that can produce some pretty impressive sound when given the chance.
My favourite example of what the band can do when all cylinders are firing is "The War", which is also my favourite song on the album. What? You thought I was going to name "The Adventure", Angels and Airwaves' best hit and the only song anyone ever talks about when you mention their name? Well, for the record, on a technical level, "The Adventure" probably is the best song on the album. The lead riff speaks for itself. The song soars atop that famous chord-progression and never comes back down to earth until it finishes. It's a perfect example of the best that AvA in space-mode can achieve. But you know what? I never quite liked it too much. For my personal taste, the song always feels distant to me. It's almost like it happens around me instead of to me. I also have issues with the lyrics, but we will touch on that in the critic section.
No, it's "The War" that impresses me most. It's this song that demonstrated something truly unique for this band. That combination of pop-punk and arena-rock is strongest on this song, with a lead riff in the intro straight out of De Longe's Blink playbook that explodes into a thunderous roar just as the song hits full-swing. Everything lands on this song. Willard's drumming is simply imposing and immense. Every crash and thumb feels like it's rattling your rib-cage. The guitars switch to acoustic in the verses and swirl through the synths and strings in a way that the band has never replicated. The lyrics are tight and measured. Every rhyme lands, every line feels necessary. There's no chaff. It's De Longe finally stripping off his pretences and getting to the point, something which allows him to deliver stingers like,
The house, laid out like targets,
With the deafening sound, we watch them all go down
And the families,
Now useless bodies,
They lay still, black and blue,
Our gift from us to you.
This was the first and last time that De Longe's lyrics ever had this level of personality and verve in an AvA song. You get the sense that the message of this anti-war anthem really matters to him, that it's bigger than he is and does not deserve to be buried under asinine pseudo-philosophy. This is De Longe with heart on sleeve, bellowing his question, "Why won't you tell me it's almost over?" with such power that you forgive his usually difficult vocals. They fit for once instead of feeling out of place next to the instruments, because his pop-punk yowling is once more channelled towards a spirit of rebellion, where it belongs. This for me was AvA at their best, something which will probably never happen again.
That said, dear God does Tom De Longe need an editor. Or at least he needs to listen to one. A problem that has characterised his writing since Blink 182 is his listless and banal writing style. The best way to describe it is that he tosses words together in a salad bowl without any regard for how they fit together. It doesn't even have to make sense half the time.
To illustrate my point I refer back to my mention of The Adventure's lyrics being my main flaw with the song. You need look no further than the opening lines:
"I want to have the same last dream again, / Â the one where I wake up and I'm alive / just as the four walls closed me within / my eyes are opened up with pure sunlight."
It has taken me ten years (although it might also be due to some ineptitude on my part) to realise that those four lines were all related to the same idea. I was so focused on trying to trudge through the asinine verbosity of it all that I didn't bother to string it all into one sentence. Can you blame me when faced with dreck like "the same last dream again"? That isn't any recognisable sentence structure that I know of. I know what it means, but it's so damn clumsy that it might as well be Pig-Latin. The same goes for "My eyes are opened up with pure sunlight." What an unbelievably hackneyed and convoluted way to say that he opened his eyes to bright sunlight after a nightmare. Moreover, why include that detail at all? It has nothing to do with the next line, "I'm the first to know, my dearest friends", so what did it achieve?
Nothing. So much of Tom Delonge's writing is a big, fat nothing. It's a cornucopia of figures of speech slapped together because they apparently sound cool, and nothing is said in the process. It's sad, because he'll write nonsense like "I'm frightened at night and the wind has a roar" in "Do it For Me Now" just after he writes "It's a world of hate gone incredibly wrong" in "Distraction". He'll start the song "Start the Machine" brilliantly with "The ash set in and blew away" and then immediately follow it up with the broken howler, "It's getting lost into the sea". The guy can actually write good lyrics, but he gets so caught up with trying to prove his own alleged genius that he completely forgoes the basics of goddamn syntax, and it makes him sound like a moderately intelligent parrot with Alzheimer's trying to replicate human speech (and failing). It single-handedly ruins his music and I wish he would drop it, but he only does in fits and bursts and it's frustrating.
That's to say nothing of his now notorious vocals. Now, I personally find it easy to overlook them but I don't for one second actually believe that they are remotely close to a good fit for this album. There are times when it works, like the pre-chorus of "Do It For Me Now" where he harmonises well with Ryan Sinn's backing vocals (which, by the way, are a huge highlight and greatly missed on every record until "The Dreamwalker"), or, as I mentioned before, the entirety of "The War", but for the most part his trademark yowling just feels out of place and out of depth, and I wish that he had found another vocalist to carry the band, but his ego would not allow that.
Lastly, I would like to point out a single moment on this record that becomes more and more of a problem as AvA's career goes on. In "It Hurts", De Longe pretty much ruins his song by, for absolutely no reason, ripping the entire cadence of "The War's" pre-chorus out, wholesale, and slapping it into the bridge of "It Hurts". Even the lyrical structure is near-identical. Instead of saying, "Please, do you want this? Please, do I want this too?" He says "Sherrie, do you want it? Sherrie, I want it too." Every single time I hear it, it knocks me out of the song faster than a baseball on a home-run, and it is a warning sign that, on his own, De Longe's pool of ideas is pretty darn limited. Frighteningly so, actually.
Recommendation: Ultimately, this record is solid. It's not altogether bad, and in fact has some pretty great moments. The instruments all perform admirably in every song, so if you focus your listening onto that aspect it should still be a decent experience. Spend any time trying to decipher De Longe's lyrics, however, and you might find yourself slowly sinking into a depression-induced dementia.
